"There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it."

Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation“, 1925

9/16/2013

Clear and light colors have always been a Lanvin trademark. One within Jeanne Lavins' palette is a green inspired by Diego Velázquez' paintings. For her only daughters wedding to the Count de Polignac in 1925 she came up with a powdery pink which she subsequently included into her collections and labeled Polignac. And her copy of the blue which Fra Angelico used in his fresco for the Niccoline Chapel became the designer's true signature color. Today many years after Madame Lavins' passing Lanvin still exists. It is named the oldest French fashion house, dating back to 1905. Michele Obama was photographed in Lanvin sneakers while volunteering at the food bank (2009), Lanvin became guest designer for one collection at H&M (2010) and the official producer of the London-based football club Arsenal FC (2013). In 2006 by than artistic director Alber Elbaz introduced a new packaging for the line which supposedly features a bright pastel hue version of Madame's favorite blue, which outgrew the blues in Angelico's fresco into a bubble-gum-soft-serve-forget-me-not-flower-baby-blue matched with a stark black silk ribbon.

6/23/2013

Remember full moon alternating with new moon in a period of four days. One dope-drunk with a donkey's head chases the juice of the flower. Dewdrops show like liquid pearls through haze guarded by the dark pounding forces from the strange world within a forest.

Vow dangles lively and symmetrically off the wall. In this place with four right angles a yellowed white fabric forms a tetrahedra; its top points downward to the floor. Upside-down attic. Nook or corner, where a piece of bamboo lies. Hanging nest or a peculiarly built bed. It remembers the mollusk’s shell; beautiful to look at, mobile and at the same time the construction seems segregated from itself.“I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realized they were not so artificial.” Travelling light in 1975, the artist boards a plane. The collectors Sarabhai have invited him to their family‘s residence in the town of Ahmedabad in India. Following his arrival, with habitual self imposed restrictions, he collects material on his expeditions around the temporary workplace. In doing so he buys locally produced natural fabrics in nuanced textures and vibrating colors. He combines these with canes and other finds (small aluminum cans, a glass bottle, adobe, cords out of hemp et cetera) to form a sequence of puzzlingly simple sets. You‘d think, uncoupled from their cultural context, the scarce formations appear post-minimal, Tuttle-esque and exotic. With the usual „vernacular glance“ R. loosely interlaces color and geometric abstraction into architectures in which you could blow your nose. Doors and windows are missing, the rooms are lined with spontaneous folds; nothing is coming from the outside nor is anything going outward. This sort of house does not fight. It offers resistance in facile and subtle lineaments.
The superordinate name of the series (Jammer) is taken from Windjammer, the ultimate tall ship. Actually a mighty machine made of wood and steel, appareled with several masts and characteristically vast rectangular sails, it is also this type of sailing ship, which in its miniature form could be tucked in a decorative glass bottle. Some years before (1969) R. emerges in such a bottle; he relocates his once friendly, utopically opened studio from Manhattan onto an island off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. Here, belt, necktie and brogues stay in the wardrobe. What then are the options, kimono or oversized shirt? From such shells, the imagination allows amazing creatures to come out. In this same year, the summer bulletin of the former Midpeninsula Free University prints: „The natural state of man is ecstatic wonder. We should not settle for less“.

1/02/2013

“In the words of Auguste Racinet (L’Ornement Polychrome, 1875 – 1888), the ‘irrepressible acanthus has passed through twenty-two centuries without losing one of its leaves and has covered with its branches the whole monumental world.’ Its scrolled leave has been the basis of many a scrollwork pattern. Scrollwork has appeared constantly in printed textiles from the eighteenth century on. Sometimes quite acanthus-like, and sometimes stylized into an almost abstract impression of looping vines and leaves. It combines allover coverage with graceful lightness and is usually nondirectional.”

"Scrollwork" is one archive of texts related to painting and design by Constanze Schweiger. It takes its suggestion from the scrollwork pattern which has covered with its branches the monumental world without loosing one of its leaves. In the same way as scrollwork sometimes resembles acanthus leaves, sometimes an abstract pattern, the texts oscillate between objects that tend in different directions and yet still form a coherent whole.